The last two times Mitch had been to see Laura, he had been wearing a tiny but powerful voice-activated tape recorder sewn into the lining of his suit jacket. It had lain on the chair beside the bed when they made love, and he had tried to get her to admit she had a boyfriend, as Hollins had suspected. He had also been wearing it the night she told him the police were about to find the Luger in his garage.

The recorder was part of the deal. Why he got off with only a warning for not reporting the theft of an unregistered firearm.

‘What’ll happen to her now?’ he asked Hollins.

‘With any luck, both she and her boyfriend will do life,’ said Hollins. ‘But what do you care? After the way she treated you. She’s a user. She chewed you up and spat you out.’

Mitch sighed. ‘Yeah, I know…’ he said. ‘But it could have been worse, couldn’t it?’

‘How?’

‘I could’ve ended up married to her.’

Hollins stared at him for a moment, then he burst out laughing. ‘I’m glad you’ve got a sense of humour, Mitchell. You’ll need it, what’s coming your way next.’

Mitch shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Hey, just a minute! We made a deal. You assured me there’d be no charges over the gun.’

Hollins nodded. ‘That’s right. We did make a deal. And I never go back on my word.’

Mitch shook his head. ‘Then I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’

‘Well, there’s this lady from the Law Society waiting outside, Mitchell. And she’d really like to talk to you.’

In our village, they were always known as the ‘Two Ladies of Rose Cottage’: Miss Eunice with the white hair, and Miss Teresa with the grey. Nobody really knew where they came from, or exactly how old they were, but the consensus held that they had met in India, America or South Africa and decided to return to the homeland to live out their days together. And in 1939 they were generally believed to be in or approaching their nineties.

Imagine our surprise, then, one fine day in September, when the police car pulled up outside Rose Cottage, and when, in a matter of hours, rumours began to spread throughout the village: rumours of human bones dug up in a distant garden; rumours of mutilation and dismemberment; rumours of murder.

Lyndgarth is the name of our village. It is situated in one of the most remote Yorkshire Dales, about twenty miles from Eastvale, the nearest large town. The village is no more than a group of limestone houses with slate roofs clustered around a bumpy, slanted green that always reminded me of a handkerchief flapping in the breeze. We have the usual amenities – grocer’s shop, butcher’s, newsagent’s, post office, school, a church, a chapel, three public houses – and proximity to some of the most beautiful countryside in the world.

I was fifteen in 1939, and Miss Eunice and Miss Teresa had been living in the village for twenty years, yet still they remained strangers to us. It is often said that you have to ‘winter out’ at least two years before being accepted into village life, and in the case of a remote place like Lyndgarth, in those days, it was more like ten.

As far as the locals were concerned, then, the two ladies had served their apprenticeship and were more than fit to be accepted as fully paid up members of the community, yet there was about them a certain detached quality that kept them ever at arm’s length.

They did all their shopping in the village and were always polite to people they met in the street; they regularly attended church services at St Oswald’s and helped with charity events; and they never set foot in any of the public houses. But still there was that sense of distance, of not quite being – or not wanting to be – a part of things.

The summer of 1939 had been unusually beautiful despite the political tensions. Or am I indulging in nostalgia for childhood? Our dale can be one of the most grim and desolate landscapes on the face of the earth, even in August, but I remember the summers of my youth as days of dazzling sunshine and blue skies. In 1939 every day was a new symphony of colour – golden buttercups, pink clover, mauve cranesbill – ever changing and recombining in fresh palettes. While the tense negotiations went on in Europe, while Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, and while there was talk of conscription and rationing at home, very little changed in Lyndgarth.

Summer in the dale was always a season for odd jobs – peat-cutting, wall-mending, sheep-clipping – and for entertainments, such as the dialect plays, the circus, fairs and brass bands. Even after war was declared on 3 September, we still found ourselves rather guiltily having fun, scratching our heads, shifting from foot to foot, and wondering when something really warlike was going to happen.

Of course, we had our gas masks in their cardboard boxes, which we had to carry everywhere; street lighting was banned, and motor cars were not allowed to use their headlights. This latter rule was the cause of numerous accidents in the dale, usually involving wandering sheep on the unfenced roads.

Some evacuees also arrived from the cities. Uncouth urchins for the most part, often verminous and ill-equipped for country life, they seemed like an alien race to us. Most of them didn’t seem to have any warm clothing or Wellington boots, as if they had never seen mud in the city. Looking back, I realize they were far from home, separated from their parents, and they must have been scared to death. I am ashamed to admit, though, that at the time I didn’t go out of my way to give them a warm welcome.

This is partly because I was always lost in my own world. I was a bookish child and had recently discovered the stories of Thomas Hardy, who seemed to understand and sympathize with a lonely village lad and his dreams of becoming a writer. I also remember how much he thrilled and scared me with some of the stories. After ‘The Withered Arm’ I wouldn’t let anyone touch me for a week, and I didn’t dare go to sleep after ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’ for fear that there was a horribly disfigured statue in the wardrobe, that the door would slowly creak open and…

I think I was reading Far from the Madding Crowd that hot July day, and, as was my wont, I read as I walked across the village green, not looking where I was going. It was Miss Teresa I bumped into, and I remember thinking that she seemed remarkably resilient for such an old lady.

‘Do mind where you’re going, young man!’ she admonished me, though when she heard my effusive apologies, she softened her tone somewhat. She asked me what I was reading, and when I showed her the book, she closed her eyes for a moment and a strange expression crossed her wrinkled features.

‘Ah, Mr Hardy,’ she said, after a short silence. ‘I knew him once, you know, in his youth. I grew up in Dorset.’

I could hardly hold back my enthusiasm. Someone who actually knew Hardy! I told her that he was my favourite writer of all time, even better than Shakespeare, and that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer, just like him.

Miss Teresa smiled indulgently. ‘Do calm down,’ she said, then she paused. ‘I suppose,’ she continued, with a glance towards Miss Eunice, ‘that if you are really interested in Mr Hardy, perhaps you might like to come to tea some day?’

When I assured her I would be delighted, we made an arrangement that I was to call at Rose Cottage the following Tuesday at four o’clock, after securing my mother’s permission, of course.